Friday, January 31, 2014

In
Theodore Dreiser’s turn-of-the-century novel, Sister Carrie, Carrie’s sister, Minnie, muses that, unless Carrie,
a recent arrival to her modest household in Chicago, “submitted to a solemn
round of industry . . . how was her coming to the city going to profit [Minnie
and her husband]?” This selfish outlook on Minnie’s part accidentally unleashes
one of the greatest phrases in American literature: “a solemn round of industry.”
The phrase needn’t refer to gloomy industrial tasks per se, as it might refer to the incomplete “industriousness” of
Sister Carrie, notably her unwillingness to conform, as Minnie contends, to the
laborious traditions inherent in the City of the Big Shoulders, circa 1900. Ah,
the good old days! What America wouldn’t give for a little more Industry, now,
more than 100 years after Sister Carrie fled with the manager, Hurstwood, who
helped himself to a sack of loot, to boot. People would probably submit to
Industry, if Industry would open a few hundred factories; okay, even five or
six. Instead of Industry, Americans must submit to other forces, such as DNA
paternity tests. It’s a flawed principle, you’ll grant me, to rely upon the
confusing haze of promiscuity in order to “grow the economy.” The Hookup
Economy, at best, allows a laboratory to hire a ‘Night Guy’ for the newly-minted graveyard shift, and nobody really knows what goes on then, except the
cleaning crew, who dance with the ‘Night Guy’ to “Heart of Glass.” On the other
hand, Google Girth now tracks the whereabouts and deeds of Chris Christie, the
embattled New Jersey Governor whose accumulation of scandals rivals Imelda
Marcos’ accumulation of sandals. Still, the Chris Christie economy doesn’t add
many people (but his cronies) to the payroll, and Google Girth, for its part,
hired the chap who’d been rotating the egg camera at the Great Blue Heron nest.
That’s an albatross for the labor force, who yearn, aloud, to submit. “Let us
submit,” they cry, amid googling. The gurgling you hear isn’t the gargling of a
desperate labor force, but the water in the hookah pipe, it turns out. The toiler
submits to a solemn round of hookah. The toiler sits in armchairs, in divans,
in minivans, in situ; the toiler sits in hot tubs, in dance clubs, for back
rubs, for medicinal shrubberies; wherever can be found a sitter can be found a googling
hookah, the apple jack tabac, Jack.
Lo, the American Dude sits on the couch, and considers the sport that destroys
the athlete. I am an American Dude, I too consider the sport that destroys the
athlete. There follows a solemn round of touchdowns, a solemn round of
advertisement, and a solemn round of indigestion. Both oceans batter our
shores. Across them, in exotic lands, can be heard the faint sounds of
Industry, the pile driven into the soil, the pain of the soil, the dumb might
of the mechanical driver.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

At
some point in the otherwise brilliant Craft Beer Revolution, someone—a brewer?
a pub owner?—decided to serve a brew in a goblet, while, at the same time,
administering “price creep” to the tab. We’ll return to the Goblet Problem in a
moment, but first, let’s review a few basic principles that would govern pricing
in any marketplace. A brewer who brews a smaller quantity of beer than, say,
Boodweiser, and perhaps operates with a smaller distribution network than does
Boodweiser, will, in all likelihood, have to charge a bit more for beer than
Boodweiser would charge for a Bood or a Bood Lite. I also understand that, in a
Big City, the pub has to pay Big City rent, electricity, etc., and these expenses
stack up higher than for a pub situated, say, in the Wilderness. Still, when
the bartender brings me an 8-oz (eight ounce) goblet of beer, and asks for $8
(eight dollars), I’ve got to conclude that both parties—brewer and pub—have
begun to charge me (the consumer) for the phrase “Craft Beer.” Even if I’m
wrong about the Elite Pricing Strategy at the Craft Beer Taps, that doesn’t
change the bottom line, namely that a helping of Craft Beer will effectively
price the Little Guy out of the market. In the end, $8 isn’t just $8. Tax makes
the tab closer to $9, and after I leave a buck for the bartender, I’ve spent
$10 on a goblet of beer. Two goblets is $20, and so forth, until I cannot
indulge in much pub-going each week. [Ed. Note: the same beer, in the retail
environment, typically costs $2 or less per 12-oz bottle.] Now, let’s get back
to that Goblet Problem. It might as well be called a Snifter of Beer, or a
Snort of Beer, or a Pinch of Beer. No, a beer should not arrive in an 8-oz
goblet, it should arrive in a 16-oz pint glass, filled to the rim with beer, and
I’m sorry to say this, but Boodweiser does not get served in an 8-oz goblet, does
it? “Oh, can I please have an 8-oz pour of the Bood Light? Thank you. Put it on
my tab.” A snifter of Boodweiser: Yeah, right: I don’t
prefer Bood to a good Craft Stout, but Boodweiser doesn’t arrive in pretentious
glasses. The Craft Beer Revolution gives us great beer, brews that we always
yearned for, that we couldn’t even conceive of, before we beheld a pint or a
bottle. Everyday guys brew these beers—dudes with beards and overalls and
dyspepsia—as opposed to Corporate Facilities. The Cost of Living soars, unless
I remove several Craft Beers from my Basket of Goods. Beer Guys: Double-You,
Tee, Eff? I don’t alight upon a barstool in order to drink a few goblets; I’m
there to drink some pints. It’s not wine, it’s not brandy. It’s beer!

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Never
mind the SmarTrip card readers which often reject your first, second, and third
swipes; Never mind the herky jerky braking of cars which toss you about during
all phases of slowing; Never mind the sheer volume of trash onboard a typical
car—KFC gristle, unread Express, and half-spent
Sunny D bottles, for example; Never mind the persistent breakdowns of railcars
and the resultant single-tracking that never makes any sense unless witnessing
seven trains headed in the opposite direction with none servicing your platform,
for an hour, makes any sense; Never
mind the overhead station announcements so loud and so garbled that nothing can
be gleaned from them and at the same time nothing else can transpire while they
occur; Never mind the same garbled, painful, staticky intercom announcements
onboard the cars themselves that offer nothing discernible, in the end, for the
rider; Never mind the persistent overcrowding on trains; Never mind the railcar
designs that don’t seem to anticipate even a few standing passengers; Never
mind the riders who must jam doors and disable doors and force the offloading
of the entire train despite another train (visibly) lurking in the tunnel, its
headlights glowing like two febrile eyes; Never mind the arrival boards that
routinely mistake the arrival times of trains—that, or suggest the arrival of a
(first ever!) two-car train; Never mind the wisdom of station managers who,
with one functional escalator, freeze it in the down position, forcing all
arriving passengers to trudge up the twenty-story hike to the street; No, never
mind all that; What I’d like to know is, what the heck is that nasty burning
smell, it smells like electrical wires afire and burnt monster truck tires and ‘incinerated
bathroom’, the Metro Rail system didn’t used to smell like that but now it does
smell like that all the time, especially with a train idling on the platform,
and we, the riders, have to breathe that smell on a regular basis, and I mean,
any thoughtful person will conclude that the smell is (1) very harmful and (2)
hurting me and other riders and (3) not being addressed AT ALL.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Many
years ago, during a period of General Disarray, the earth pulled a big hunk of
intergalactic rock into its molten core, and the big hunk of rock became part
of the earth, and part of the earth snapped off, and became the moon. The wound
healed, the earth pulled the moon, and the moon pulled the earth because the
moon is made of earth, which pulls. We suffer from this dynamic today. The
earth pulls us down, the moon pulls us up, but the earth pulls harder, so in
the end, we shrink, but not so badly, because the moon keeps pulling, too, in
its own little way. On the one hand, people administer more oral sex than ever
before, but on the other hand, if you were five foot eleven, like me, a few
years ago, you may be five foot ten and three-quarters today, like me, on
account of this gravitational battle. At some point, the earth begat Nature,
and Nature, like the earth, pulls all the time. The flower pulls the bee. The
mountain pulls the cloud. The fire pulls the wind. The primate pulls (on) the
whiskey flask. For these reasons, people are forever establishing their
whereabouts, especially on mobile phone calls. “I’m on the auto-boos,” they say. “I’m on the dubious
mitigation foray.” “I’m on the water closet.” Some might see the double-pull
situation as “checks and balances.” The founders of our country based our
entire system of government on the dual attractions perpetrated by these two
celestial orbs. Cussing, when pulled, becomes percussion. It’s a lot of
percussion out there. So much so, it’s a grave situation. As in, what could be
more serious, more grave, than the grave, the actual grave. The earth, in the
end, is a giant cemetery. But not before it exerted pull. The earth, as we know,
has pull in most situations. The font
pulled the filmmaker. You know what I mean. It fused. It is Times New Roman
Polanski.

Monday, January 27, 2014

The
general practitioner no longer interrogates a patient, but the patient’s blood-work,
instead. Clicks the pen, does the G.P., and scribbles script. On account of
your “levels” you must now take a pill for the rest of your life, if you do as
G.P. says. Do you have a symptom? Good. If you don’t have a symptom, then why
have you gone to the doctor in the first place? Oh, I see, because you need to
prevent a disease from getting you, somewhere down the line. Clearly, the first
sign of trouble—is having no symptom(s) at all. Chances are, you stepped into
the office healthy, but left the office as a person who has a pre-illness; you
left the office pre-sickly. Clicks the pen, does the G.P., somewhere else, down
the corridor. You are, by now, idling at the reception desk, staring out at a
simmering ruck of patients in the waiting area. Hey, to be a patient requires patience, because the doctor won’t call you back for a couple of
hours. Some people go back straightaway, though. They wear shiny suits, and uncork
their shiny grins, and tug behind them heavy suitcases on wheels. You can
subtract “Theory” from “Conspiracy Theory”, by the way, when the Conspiracy holds
itself up to the light. The doctor is also, as they say, a pharmacy. His
shelving overfloweth with free samples. The drug rep comes out, his suitcase a
little lighter. He will make many rounds (house calls!) in the same building
until he has delivered all the samples to all the doctors. It has been noted by
many reliable researchers that doctors with ties to Big Pharm are responsible
for determining the blood-work levels required to verify your pre-illness. It
may follow that the free sample carousel must be part of some elaborate (and
lucrative) reward system to benefit the entire doctoring field. Click, goes the
doctor’s pen. Click, click. What’s next? If you don’t have a pre-illness, then you may be at risk for developing a pre-illness. How’s your
pre-illness? Can you take a pre-illness day at work? Do they cover pre-illness
in pre-med? No, no, no! I get it, I get it! The medical profession has
successfully dealt a blow to illness … by creating pre-illness. Pretty soon,
there will be no more illin’ people, anywhere, in the world. Everybody will be
pre-illin’.

After a
month of intense deliberations (with appropriate breaks for Stout) I have
decided to forge ahead with the blog. According to Blogger statistics, last
year alone Blood And Gutstein recorded more page-views than in its previous
four years (combined), with hits in the tens of thousands. I offer my
sincere thanks to devoted readers and casual tourists alike, and pledge to
create more mayhem in 2014, a year that has a nice ring to its own numerology.

Up that
alley, and to make up for lost time, next week will be Complaint Week at Blood
And Gutstein, with five posts (one for each business day) featuring unmitigated
critical acumen (read: Complaints) of various types and various sizes. It’ll be
“thcandalouth”; it’ll be “ludicrouth.” Critics will dub it UnmitiGate or maybe
even MitiGate. Topics may include, but will not be limited to Medicine, “American
Dudes”, Beer Prices, Gravity, and Smoking.

You may be
interested to know a few things about Posts of Yore. Here are a few Blood And
Gutstein facts, as reported by Blogger statistics:

APPEARANCES WITH HETERODYNE IMPROVISATIONAL MUSIC PROJECT

I have appeared several times (as “Words”) with the Heterodyne improvisational music project, which is led by Maria Shesiuk and Ted Zook. Other performers have included Sarah Hughes, Leah Gage, Doug Kallmeyer, Bob Boilen, Sam Lohman, Amanda Huron, and Patrick Whitehead. Here are three free sample recordings, each about 30 minutes long, available on Soundcloud: